Cathy Young: A Feminist Flare Up

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The debate continues to rage over over who has the right to use the "feminist" label. Cathy Young, a contributing editor for Reason magazine, weighs in via her weekly column for RealClearPolitics. Excerpts:

Perhaps all the talk of the "Year of the Conservative Woman," sparked by the crop of fairly conservative Republican women running for office, has slightly unhinged some feminists on the left. Or maybe it's a flare-up of the Palin Derangement Syndrome caused by Sarah Palin's galling insistence on calling herself a feminist. For whatever reason, the Feminist Dogma Police is out in force, handing down edicts on where the party lines must be drawn -- and, for whatever reason, they have been getting a platform for these edicts not in specialty publications but in the mainstream media. The loser, ultimately, is feminism itself.

First, The Washington Post ran blogger Jessica Valenti's diatribe against Palin and other women who, in her view, were trying to usurp the feminist mantle. Sure, Valenti allowed, diversity of opinions is good -- but goddess forbid there should be feminists who dissent from the sisterhood's orthodoxy on abortion or pay equity, or who believe that women in America today are not oppressed by "the patriarchy." Then, Slate.com published a piece by another big gun of the left-wing feminist blogosphere, Amanda Marcotte, titled "A short history of 'feminist' anti-feminists" and painting Palin as the latest in a line of "women who call themselves feminist" while opposing the feminist movement.

Marcotte's account, which identifies three generations of "feminist anti-feminists," is pretty shoddy history. For one, her first generation -- the Eagle Forum's Phyllis Schlafly or Concerned Women for America founder Beverly LaHaye -- consists of women who never called themselves feminists and explicitly opposed gender equality as counter to the God-given roles of the sexes. (Bizarrely, Marcotte even calls this first wave "plain ol' anti-feminism.") And her third generation, which includes Palin and is clumsily labeled "co-opting feminism anti-feminism," is a random list of women and organizations whose only common feature seems to be that they either oppose abortion or believe that women are ill-served by a sexually permissive culture.

We weren't aware until reading this Cathy Young column that Marcotte was, although admittedly only briefly, blog coordinator for the John Edwards presidential campaign. How's that metrosexual pet male thing workin' out for the radical leftist feminists now? No wonder they're all so angry and a disproportionate share of them are lesbians. They put their political trust in such beta males as Edwards, Bill Clinton and the Kennedy brothers, all serial cheaters. Go figure.

Read the full op-ed here.

- JP